‘Where are you going?’ Pir asked him breathlessly.
‘To…to the ashram,’ He said as his voice faltered.
Pir spat on the ground. When he looked up, he was no longer a child. There was violence in his eyes.
Sana chewed on and stared at Yogi. Her eyes were those of a dead fish.
SrK packed Yogi’s suitcase slowly and carefully. He placed the books at the bottom and then put the neatly folded clothes on top. Home clothes were rolled up in the corner. There was something womanlike about him.
‘You will go, won’t you?’ He asked, his voice almost hard to hear.
Yogi nodded. SrK couldn’t see him as his eyes were sunk in the suitcase. Yogi hoped he wouldn’t see him. His heart was heavy, and warm with guilt. SrK had loved him, called out to him. He had said no.
SrK slid a jar of sweet aam pickle under Yogi’s clothes.
‘You are running away,’ SrK said. ‘You know that, don’t you?’
Something steeled in Yogi, suddenly. Saffron is the colour of abandonment, isn’t it?
‘Boys go there and remain boys all their lives,’ SrK said absently. ‘They never leave. The brotherhood is overpowering.’
He wrapped Yogi’s sports shoes in newspaper. Headlines stared at Yogi’s face.
‘My brothers got into the sports field,’ he went on. ‘The big grassy patch near the main gate. Running in circles. Playing football to get closer to God. Mobs of sweaty, muddy boys. Shepherding them to the haze of incense in the prayer hall.’
‘The scent of sweaty, muddy boys,’ his voice softened. ‘They could never leave.’
Suddenly, SrK turned around.
‘But what about Kajol?’ He asked. ‘He’s such a smart student. Everybody’s dream!’
‘Kajol knows what he wants,’ Yogi said calmly. But his heart beat wildly.
SrK squatted on the floor like an old woman. His eyes looked lost.
‘You were special, Anirvan,’ he said. ‘I thought you were for the world.’
Yogi stared at him in silence.
The Colour of Desertion
He was the conscience and protector of the dynasty. Bhishma disentangled his colossal bow from his shoulder and reached for his quiver. He was a great silver man. Dressed in white and silver, his long white beard floating in the wind. His eyes looked like they belonged to a sad lion. They had a dull shine.
He was all-powerful. He had given up everything. No desire, no woman, no offspring, nothing of this world.
Bhishma reached for his quiver. The ancient patriarch of the Kaurava dynasty and the general of their army, who would die only when he wanted to die. No one could kill him against his wish.
They were in the battlefield and their flesh throbbed. They were not watching TV. They were not watching the long-running soap opera which brought to life their heroes from The Mahabharata exactly the way they imagined it. Silver Bhishma, a ferocious Karna and an agile Arjun.
The common room of Bliss Hall was a dark place. The TV was a small square of light that flickered in front. But they were all inside it, there on the battlefield.
Eighty boys from Class 9 sat huddled in the darkness, afraid to breathe. Kajol and Yogi sat at the back, next to the Lotus who sat on a chair behind them.
They held their breath. Bhishma was going to shoot missiles at Arjun. Grandsire Bhishma! Tremors shot through their flesh. The great ancient sage warrior was going to shoot the hell out of prettyboy Arjun dressed as a woman while the Pandavas served their hidden exile. Big sari-wrapped thighs and false long hair. Killer weapons tied to a tree like a corpse.
‘Come,’ Kamal Swami had said the moment they arrived. ‘Mahabharat is about to come on TV. Let’s go watch.’
Kajol and Yogi followed him into the darkness of the common room. The boys were already there.
It was easy to forget everything there. There was darkness all around. There was only the shimmer of the television and the drama unfolding inside. They all knew the Pandavas were the good guys and they were exiled for no reason by the wicked Kaurava brothers, but who cared about all that when Grandsire Bhishma had pulled out a long deadly arrow and perched it on his bow.
That pansy prince who’d chickened out at the sign of the Kaurava army drove the chariot while Arjun, dressed as the eunuch who taught dance, twanged on his killer bow, the Gandiv.
They wanted the sad silver lion to win. To kill the long-haired eunuch. They longed for it because they knew it would not happen. That the long-haired eunuch was Arjun and all weapons in the universe were under his spell.
On his chariot, Bhishma frowned. The true man. The true king who never became king. The son of Holy Ganga.
He had renounced. He was a god.
Arjun! The pansy upstart eunuch!
Warmth crept on Yogi’s skin. The warmth of flesh. Kajol’s left hand was so close to his right hand that their hairs touched. Yogi could hear him breathe. His eyes were transfixed on Bhishma. Quickly, his chest rose and fell with his breath.
A mist grew inside Yogi’s chest. It was no longer Bhishma on TV but Sachin Tendulkar. The prodigal child who hit every ball out of the stadium. He was absurd and they grew mad with excitement. Mad with excitement as Kajol’s little-boy fingers curled inside Yogi’s hand.
Time had stopped. For several years.
Today Yogi and Kajol’s hands did not touch but breathed on one another. Their hair brushed against one another. Softly, they played, across Kamal Swami’s taut saffron robe.
Their minds floated outside their bodies. Vanishing wisps of air. The last breath of a dead man.
SrK had nodded when Yogi said bye. But he wouldn’t let Yogi see his eyes.
Yogi and Kajol sat in the sea of quietly breathing boys. There was no life in their bodies.
The man and the woman were vandalized statues. They looked lifeless. But their despair was muddy, dark and heavy, touched by life that had withered inside.
But the woman cried. The man was stone. His tears had stilled.
They were Kajol’s parents.
Yogi’s mother was there too. She looked at him. She fought blue shock to make sense of things. Her gaze floated all over him like a smooth reptile and tried to slip inside his clothes. She had cried too, but her tears had long dried.
His father wasn’t there. He had a busy new life.
Twelve monks stood in a row. It had to be twelve whenever new initiates took the vows. Like the original twelve brothers who had set up the order. Right here in Uttarayan, north of Calcutta. They had lit the fire on these grounds and joined hands.
The fire was ready. It simmered slowly in the haze of the dusk.
‘My boy!’ Kajol’s mother cried.
Kajol’s father looked away. Vigorously, he shook his head. Something he couldn’t bear to think about.
Kajol could have made the family proud. He would have made IIT proud with his brain. Famous American universities sat in wait for someone like him. His father, Kajol had told Yogi so many times, had the entire map in the palm of his hand. He was the man who always knew the whole story.
Kajol wanted to lose it all. Today he would.
Kajol didn’t see them there.
The two of them sat beside the fire. They were shirtless and wore thin cotton dhotis. Prayer hall dhotis. They were so thin that mosquitoes bit them through the cloth. The Lotus sat across them.
Yogi held Kajol’s hand and the whole world turned into liquid. He floated. How could a boy’s hand be bony and soft at the same time? But Kajol was no longer a boy. He was almost eighteen.
For the next seven days, the ashram would give them no food. They had to go around the neighbourhood with a begging bowl. But in these lanes, all knew the new monks. For them it was a blessing to give alms to the monks.
At the end of seven days, they would return to their patron—Kamal Swami. He would give them the white robes. They would be brahmacharis. Men who walked the god-path.
The heat of the fire burned Yogi’s eyes. He could not
see his mother anymore. Across the fire, he saw his dead grandmother. She smiled.
‘Seven generations before,’ she cackled. ‘And seven after.’
He tried to say something but could not.
‘Nirvana for all,’ she said and smiled. Her face was red in the light of the fire.
The Lotus started to hum the prayer. It was the song they sang every evening in the hostel. In the monk’s lone voice, it sounded desolate.
Kajol and Yogi sat close to each other, their naked hands entwined. They had found peace.
Kamal Swami stopped. ‘Twelve years,’ he said. ‘It will take you twelve years to earn saffron. The hue of Renunciation.’
‘But I know you boys will earn it,’ he smiled. ‘I trust you.’
Yogi’s fingers curled into Kajol’s. The heat of their skin overpowered the heat of the smoldering fire. Their breath rose and fell together. Little lifeless toys simmering in the warm brine of sweat.
‘One day everyone will learn to renounce,’ the Lotus whispered. ‘One day all will turn saffron.’
Kajol wrapped his arm around Yogi. A soft bony arm. He felt Kajol’s nails scrape his flesh.
Yogi entered his hug and felt safe. His corpse melted into nirvana.
Thank You!
The Scent of God came to me like grace, a blessing unasked, whatever it is, a story, a sensation, a fragment of a memory, of things that never happened but did, a world real but invented. But if the raw stirrings were a personal epiphany, it arrived in the world through its own temples, through communities of the faithful, through love and support of many individuals, groups and institutions.
Wellesley College, for an idyllic Fellowship at the Suzy Newhouse Center for the Humanities, where much of the writing happened. The (then) director Anjali Prabhu for her enthusiasm about my work, and for being a consistent source of support and affection. The rich community of fellows there: Sandy Alexandre, Gurminder Bhogel, Hilary Chute, Tanalis Padilla, Jerry Pinto, Banu Subramanium. Mrinalini Chakravarty for making the trip from Virginia to Boston to lead the atelier discussion on the book-inprogress. Cory McMullen for administrative support. Eve Zimmerman and Sue Sours for hosting me.
Mike Rezendes for fabulous conversation in Colorado and Cambridge, for sharing unheard stories of Betrayed and Spotlight, for his support of this book.
More than anything else, Ashoka University, my intellectual and artistic home since 2016, my wonderful colleagues and students here. A very special debt to the Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexuality, directed by Madhavi Menon, for supporting me with a group of talented research and editorial assistants who were part of the making of this book, at different stages of the process. Ishan Chatterjee, Nandita Dutta, Samarth Menon, Govind Narayan, Prithvi Pudhiarkar, Suhasini Patni, Samvida Rungta, Pragnya Divakar, Karthik Shankar, and Manasa Veluveli—you’ve put much work in this book, and for that I’m deeply grateful. Shiv Dutt Sharma for facilitating it all.
At Ashoka, thanks also to Durba Chattaraj, Jonathan Gil Harris, and Mahesh Rangarajan for their support of my work, and their enthusiasm over it.
Friends on whom I can always count on to read my work and share responses both sharp and sympathetic:
Vivek Shanbhag, who heard my half-baked mutterings about this story long before a single sentence was written and shared excitement that happily, did not fade after he read an early draft that gained much from his feedback.
Amit Chaudhuri, for embodying the sixth sense of art. And all beyond that.
Saikat Chakraborty, reader, writer, scientist, friend, who reads everything I write and manages to infect an enthusiasm about it all that is hard to believe, every time.
Wendell Mayo, who sent me out in the world years ago from his Creative Writing Program in idyllic Ohio but who continues to be a support and a sounding board as if he’s still in an office down the hall from me.
Old friends who took me back to the past to mine misty worlds: Somesh Bhattacharya, Kaushik Majumdar, Nilendu Misra. I owe you guys big time. In the same breath, Chandril Bhatacharya and Rajat Chaudhuri, denizens of the same past, nourishers of the future.
Sudip Ghosh, early reader, long-time patron, archive of everything that matters. Lopa Ghosh, friend, fellow writer, fellow parent, for reading all that I write. Warm, creative souls who have been friends to my books and its author: Jayita Sengupta, Maina Bhagat, Jhimli Mukherjee-Pandey, Keri Walsh, Ragini Tharoor-Srinivasan, Sohinee Roy, Suhrid Sankar Chattapadhyay, Kiranjeet Chaturvedi. Kindred souls in the book world who supported it in many way: Poulomi Chatterjee, Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, Anurag Basnet, Arpita Das.
Mona Sengupta and Sushroota Sarkar, for faith and ever-contagious affection.
Pinaki De, for making so many of my books such things of beauty, and for the viscerally beautiful cover for this one.
Himanjali Sankar, for her heartfelt enthusiasm about my work, not only this one, which is her godchild, but also for work I’ve published before.
Sayantan Ghosh, for being that keen editor who straddles the sweet spot between the high and the deep, the light and the solemn—here’s hoping the book has some of your wonderful spirit.
Rahul Srivastava for bringing this book to daylight. Abhay Singh and Bharti Taneja for spreading the word.
Three excerpts from the book saw daylight before the rest. The first one appeared in Caravan Vantage. That excerpt came through a somewhat difficult history, during a time of many bitter incidents of violation of free speech and writing in the South Asian public sphere. I’m especially grateful to the people who stood by me at that time and supported the book’s first utterance: Anjum Hasan, Dipanjan Sinha, Gita Hariharan, Nilanjana S. Roy, Hartosh Singh Bal, Jaya Bhattacharji-Rose, Sharon Marcus, PEN India and PEN Canada.
Arunava Sinha for conveying an early sample from a work-in-progress in Scroll.in. GJV Prasad for featuring another one in the final issue of Muse India edited by him.
This book owes is deepest debt to Subho. Without her biting discipline and bittersweet editorial love, it would have been a far lesser being.
Inaya, who is not allowed to read any of my books till she is ten, sixteen perhaps for this one; for helping me craft the blurb for this one, regardless. Neer, who is fast learning to read and write, for his endless curiosity and nonstop chatter about The Sent off God.
Thank you all.
First published in India by Simon & Schuster India, 2019
A CBS company
Copyright © Saikat Majumdar, 2019
This edition published in 2019
The right of Saikat Majumdar to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with Section 57 of the Copyright Act, 1957.
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